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Detecting the Cyberthreats that Matter

Smarter cybersecurity requires insights from across the company.

After morning coffee at his desk, a car rental company employee clicks on an email from an internal corporate address and unsuspectingly transfers malware onto the company’s global network. Weeks later, a junior cybersecurity analyst in the company discovers the malware and classifies it as a low-level danger, given the latest known threats provided by the company’s intrusion detection system.

More time passes before the company’s customer loyalty rewards program team starts receiving an unprecedented flood of customer complaints about inaccuracies in their reward point balances. Separately, the fraud detection department is seeing an unusually high number of reward redemptions. After a month-long investigation, the company finally connects the dots: A criminal network has hijacked the loyalty rewards program and cashed out hundreds of thousands of dollars of gift cards.

Cybersecurity failures like these are all too common today. As use of data explodes, cybersecurity monitoring teams struggle to keep pace with proliferating opportunities for cyberattackers. One of the biggest hurdles: How to identify the most potentially harmful breaches from the stream of alerts generated by security monitoring systems. The most effective way to stay one step ahead is to get smarter by infusing greater business awareness into cybersecurity monitoring programs. Only then can companies quickly identify, understand, and respond to cyber incidents that pose the biggest business risks. Every company needs a tailored view.

Separating the Signal from the Noise

Collaboration between the cybersecurity program and business leadership is essential. Without the context of business criticality, differentiating between a benign cybersecurity event and a costly breach can be nearly impossible. Security protocols and practices must align with established and evolving business process management. Up-to-date classification of data and business operations sensitivity—for example, personnel with legitimate access rights, and baseline behavioral patterns—provide some context by which cyberanalysts can begin to separate the signal from the noise.

To start, business units and cybersecurity teams can discuss both today’s business priorities and upcoming strategies to enable a more informed cyber monitoring plan. For example, if a digital marketing campaign is in the works, including mobile apps and other new potentially vulnerable channels, the security team should know. Then, by understanding how the application should be used, and how transactions should occur, cyberspecialists can design ways of detecting things that look suspicious. Focusing on activity that doesn’t fit expected business patterns is essential because malware detection tools alone can’t keep up with the pace of change.

Lessons from Common Pitfalls

The following scenarios explore how improving information-sharing between cybersecurity and business teams could help prevent or blunt the impact of potentially damaging breaches:

Shape monitoring around clear business priorities. In the example above of the car rental company, the failure to evaluate cyber risks in the context of business priorities enabled malware to slip in without much notice. If instead, the cybersecurity and business units had collaborated to incorporate these priorities into cybermonitoring, any security alert related to the company’s key central payment system would automatically escalate to a senior-level cybersecurity analyst for follow-up investigation. The high-priority alert would also trigger behavioral analysis of data from a range of business units, including the loyalty program and fraud departments, where anomalous spikes in customer complaints and reward redemptions could help the company stop attacks in process and contain the damage.

Know where the sensitive data is stored and how it is used. In an all-too-common scenario, a business unit might inadvertently keep sensitive information, such as employee social security numbers, in a shared file accessible to everyone in the company. In case of a breach, the business unit might blame the cybersecurity team for failing to protect them. However, the security team can’t protect the right data or know it’s been compromised without guidance on what data is sensitive, who should be given access, and how data is handled during normal operations. Leading practices are a process by which business users receive training needed to classify the data and lock down access according to their needs. This basic security hygiene also includes timely purges of inactive email accounts and access privileges of former employees, contractors, and business partners—a step that would have created more hurdles for the adversary in the rental car company example.

Know your behavioral patterns. Establishing a baseline of normal business patterns within key corporate functions also helps security analysts detect suspicious behavior. Say a securities broker-dealer knows that a particular client living in Kansas never logs into her online account. One day, she logs on from Korea and orders the company to sell her blue chip holdings and use the proceeds to purchase low-volume penny stocks. The order triggers a high alert, and the broker-dealer is confident enough that this is an example of a “pump and dump” fraud to suspend the transfer. In the case of the car rental company, knowledge of usual loyalty rewards redemption patterns helped alert the fraud department to possible foul play. However, it took many precious weeks to tie the redemptions to the malware breach due to lack of coordination between the security and fraud units.

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Coordination between cybersecurity and business units may not prevent breaches, but it raises the chances of detecting and blunting some of the most damaging ones. Collaborative habits also go a long way toward effective crisis response should a breach lead to business disruption.

About Deloitte Insights

Deloitte Insights for CIOs couples broad business insights with deep technical knowledge to help executives drive business and technology strategy, support business transformation, and enhance growth and productivity. Through fact-based research, technology perspectives and analyses, case studies and more, Deloitte Insights for CIOs informs the essential conversations in global, technology-led organizations. Learn more.

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